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So, on our last day, the hotel van was scheduled to take us to the airport at 11:20. At 11:03am, Amy and Nutan hugged–the final subtitle was nailed. It looked like this (the hug, not the subtitle):

 

Pure jubilation. Well, filtered through exhaustion. 

 

From that joyous point, we had to get all that stuff home. 

Eleven boxes of tapes–50-odd full 63 minute tapes–and hundreds of gigs backed up onto our hard disks.

 

 

So, how do you get your movie home from across the world? It lives in 50-odd tapes as well as on the Dulce Systems Duo Pro 1TB hard drive Dulce had kindly lent to us. 

In the course of our work there, we also bought a crummy little 160GB portable drive that ended up not working for our purposes, but on which we did copy a semirandom selection of about 60% of our Final Cut media files, to carry home for redundancy’s sake.

We were rolling pretty heavy–two Pelican bags and a backpack each as carry-ons, plus two pretty hefty bags each in the hold of the plane. The Pelicans were to hold our cameras, plus the Dulce hard disk drive and the precious music CDs we scored the rights to. In the Kata backpack I carried the Leica, a couple books, assorted cables, and all the tapes.

In Bangkok, we hid the tapes in the room on the opposite side from where all the bags were–thinking that if the room was broken into, the expensive looking bags would all go first, and a stack of boxes of tapes wouldn’t be of much worth to any proper thief. Even if all the stuff walked away, if we still had the tapes and the Final Cut project file, we could rebuild our movie pretty quickly.

Nothing bad happened (touch a bit of wood), and our journey was uneventful. 

First thing we did upon returning was to dig out the computer and the drive and fire up Final Cut, to check to be sure our movie (such as it is) had arrived intact.

IT LIVES!

The last subtitle: I am happy.